Hey, who else could go for some flapjacks a quick statistics post right now?

This time something different, the ever evolving time of day pattern of LGF posts down through the ages. In the chart below, each blue dot represents the date and time something got posted on the LGF front page.

If you study it closely, or not at all, various questions arise, all ripe for groundless speculation. For instance:

Everyone here remembers Iowahawk, or should. He was one of the most entertaining and insightful commenters on LGF before Charles threw him under the Little Green FootBus merely for contradicting him (commemorated here).

Without going into the details of Iowahawk’s banning, his Twitterfeed is full of clever wit and awe-inspiring snark. Tuesday’s @iowahawkblog entertainment included one typically snarky Tweet, and someone named Kris Kendrick, aka @prosediva, thought she could nail The Hawk. I doubt she even knew who she was up against, but it was still fun to watch her try.

[Caveat: The tweets below were scutinized, screencapped and stitched together in some semblance of order for continuity purposes only. No words were altered.] Read the rest of this entry »

These days, Johnson mocks those who voice concerns about “creeping Sharia”. But back in 2003, this kind of thing was a major concern at the old swamp. In this range of threads we find the beginnings of what would become a long string of warnings, and like some anti-Muslim weatherman, CJ would issue the regular “Sharia Watch”:

In this one we continue to see more familiar classic LGF themes, like the sighting of “Arafish!” (#4709), and a shift to more vitriolic anti-Muslim “Religion of…” headlines like “Religion of Hate” (#4162), “Religion of Amputation” (#4238), “Religion of Murder” (#4459), “Religion of Slavery” (#4765), “Religion of Slaughter” (#4780), and “Religion of Submission” (#4949):

The batches now begin to get a little more interesting, as we start to see some of those old memory-holed threads that we’ve rescued and featured here awhile back. We’re entering that extended era that CJ doesn’t like talking about, featuring more blatant anti-Muslim themes like #3062 “peaceful religion watch” (a title recycled many times, as you’ll discover, and leading to the infamous “Religion of Peace” term), and #3323 “the mirage of moderate islam”:

Also worth noting in this thousand, I suppose, is some indication that CJ began to take himself and his site more seriously, as he finally converts to capitalization of the titles, starting with thread #3721.

Well, when you combine CJ’s decision to hide the 6+ million old comments with the “feature” that allows loozards to change the nics that appear in their comments retroactively, what’s left is a largely invisible and otherwise incomprehensible clusterf**k of an archive that spans 10-years of global contributions on a once-popular weblog. Based on anecdotes, a pre-2009 Charles Johnson would have been proud of the width and breadth of links, facts, and opinion gathered over the years, pristinely displayed and available to all, but it appears now that he’s more concerned with attempts to mask the past, and techie features just for their own sake. Simply put, the LGF comment archive is now a mess.

Example of clusterf**k

As noble warriors in the art of flame war, and as champions of logic, reason, and general fact-checking, collectively, we’ve looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and thrown up our arms. CJ’s lopped off his nose and successfully spited his face.

In response, we’ve decided to…*ahem*…”rescue” the entirety of the LGF archives, starting with the first 1000 articles. Going forward, we’re going to dump these files as they were gathered -including sekrit threads- with their original commenters and content completely intact, a thousand strawberries at a time. We’re doing this to provide a resource; it should come in handy for anyone who wants to peruse an older LGF thread without subjecting their account to Johnson’s sensors and alarms. Who knows, perhaps even CJ will find them valuable?

These will batches will come in the form of zip files containing a thousand html grabs, stored on a file sharing site. As we go, we’ll add these links to a handy page that we’ll keep linked under the masthead.

Note: In these batches, memory-holed threads will appear as a snapshot of the LGF main page (circa 2010). Of course, we’ve featured those threads individually over the last few years, but now we’ve dedicated them to their own batch (for the grand finale).

For reference, the list of the first 1k threads (and the location of the memory-holed articles) below the fold.